Dr Natasha Campling PhD, BSc (Hons) RN
Senior Research Fellow
Dr Natasha Campling started her career as a cancer and palliative nurse at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London before becoming an academic researcher in 2000. She has worked on an extensive range of studies, leading to a broad range of publications. Most recently she has focused entirely on palliative and end-of-life research, working on SMART (Self-Management of Analgesia and Related Treatments at the end of life) funded by the Health Technology Assessment programme of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). The study focused on the development and feasibility testing of an educational intervention to improve the supported self-management of opioids and the related side-effects of nausea, constipation and drowsiness. She led the qualitative components of the study, including design, data collection and analysis. Following SMART, Natasha combined work in two end-of-life specific areas. Firstly, Supporting Family Caregivers at End of Life, funded by the National Institute of Health Research’s School for Social Care Research. The study implemented evidence about how to support family caregivers in the transition between hospital and home for end of life care. Natasha led the implementation via palliative and end-of-life care teams within 12 NHS hospitals across England. Secondly, she collaborated on a programme of work focused on treatment decisions in the face of patient deterioration in hospital: development and implementation of treatment escalation plans, funded by NIHR CLAHRC (Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care) Wessex. Natasha led a complex retrospective case note review and in-depth analysis examining escalation related decision-making in acute deterioration at the end-of-life. Natasha currently works on ActMed (Accessing Medicines at end-of-life), a multi-stakeholder, mixed method evaluation of service provision funded by the Health Services and Delivery Research programme of the NIHR, for which she is a co-investigator.
Understanding the experiences of patients and their families at the end of life through research is vital to enhancing care and delivering service improvements